Author: VD

A former Star & Sickle journalist also views Nicolas Kristoff’s lament for days gone by with a skeptical eye:

I’m not saying this is utter rubbish (how’s that for a left-handed compliment), but I am convinced that the so-called objectivity, nothing-but-the-facts model really doesn’t do the trick, especially when the facts are being chosen, ordered and told by reporters, 80 to 90 percent of whom are liberals.

It’s remarkable that after all this time, there are still only a few journalists such as Eric Black who are capable of recognizing that, in hindsight, maybe they weren’t collectively all that objective after all. I’ve known a fair number of journalists over the years, from NPR stars to wannabees putting in their time at the little local papers, and I can count on one hand the number that didn’t hold completely predictable left-liberal views on every major issue.

It was particularly amusing when I sent in three sample columns when the St. Paul Pioneer Press decided they wanted a new columnist to replace their token conservative who was departing. Keep in mind that at the time, I was not only their video game columnist, but I’d written one or two editorial page pieces on technology issues that no one there had been capable of grasping, such as the Unabomber’s manifesto and, more importantly, was the only columnist at the paper to be nationally syndicated in years. I can’t remember what the third column was, but the first two were explaining how the economics of taxpayer funding for sports stadiums didn’t add up and showing that conceal carry laws never lead to the oft-predicted bloodbaths.

The editor was very uncomfortable in trying to explain that while my writing was good enough for the Tech page, I just “wasn’t right for the Editorial page”. Translation: “your opinions aren’t right for any opinion page over which I have any say”. Needless to say, I was shocked that I didn’t get the slot. I think he seriously thought I was crazy, as opposing taxpayer-funded stadiums is downright heresy to any newspaper editor who depends on filling up his Sports page with news about the local team and selling advertisements to their fans.

I’m not in the least bit bitter about it, but I’m certainly not shedding any tears for the gatekeepers either as the technology-enabled barbarians storm the gates. Nor, I think, is any other right-of-center newspaper reader who had to put up with that faux objectivity for decades. In the news business, you don’t have to tell people what they want to hear, but you really do have to avoid insulting their intelligence. Newspaper readers may read at only a eighth-grade level on average, (or, more likely, that’s just the lowest common denominated target for which editors aim), but even an elementary school child can detect when you’re pulling one over on him if you do it every single freaking day.

This post brought to you courtesy of the Fraters Libertas, who, after yesterday’s post, I doubt I’ll be visiting on NARN anytime soon… I am renegade, Ice…man.

Powerline’s John Hindraker finally sees fit to take exception to an unconstitutional action by the Congress. And, as you’d expect of a staunchly tone-deaf Republican, he’s outraged by the Congressional attack on the bailout bonuses:

I’m stupefied to find that some people are defending the constitutionality of Nancy Pelosi’s discriminatory, confiscatory and retroactive tax on people who receive bonus income from companies that got TARP money. I would have considered it a bright line rule that the government can’t identify a class of unpopular people and impose a special tax on them. What’s next? A 100% income tax on registered Republicans, retroactive to last year? If Pelosi’s bill passes muster, why not?

Spare me. Hindraker and his fellow Republicans defended one abuse of the Constitution after another when it was George Bush and the Republican-led Congress spying on Americans and invading countries without declaring war. They ridiculed Ron Paul when he pointed out those and other massively unconstitutional issues such as the paper dollar, foreign aid, and the various military occupations around the world. They worked hard to elect the Senate’s champion of the unconstitutional banking bailouts, John McCain, and many of them, including Hindraker, publicly supported the bailouts.

Now he’s trying expressing outrage over one more Congressional unconstitutionality that might take a bonus away from a high-income banker? This isn’t just hypocrisy, it’s utter political idiocy. Good luck getting the pitchfork-bearing masses worked up about the theoretical plight of a banking employee married to a wealthy lawyer. (That was a remarkably explicit example, by the way, does his wife work for Wells Fargo or something?) Regardless, the lawyer Hindraker clearly doesn’t understand that most Americans would vastly prefer to see this theoretical lawyer garrotted with piano wire than to see his wife take home a $10,000 bonus from a bailout bank if given a choice between the two. Hindraker may consider a mere $10k bonus to be a paltry sum, but it is 18 percent of the 2007 median Minnesota household income.

And Wells Fargo wasn’t “forced” to take the bailout money. (Hindraker omits to mention that it was the Republican Bush administration, not the Democratic Congress or the Obama administration that “forced” them to take it.) Wells Fargo could have refused it. They didn’t.

The United States entered the lawless territory of a banana republic a long time ago. It’s a pity that it took influential Republicans like the Powerline guys so long to notice it, but that’s what happens when you prefer to defend the people in power and ignore the abuses they are committing. Back in September, when it still mattered, Hindraker said his “instinct has been to support the bailout proposal“. Now his instincts tell him that “there is nothing wrong with the AIG bonuses“.

With all due respect, Mr. Hindraker, your instincts suck. You were on the wrong side then and you’re on the wrong side now. Once you have embraced the expansion of federal power, you don’t get to complain that you don’t like the particular direction in which it is now expanding. If, under heavy pressure from the Republican White House, Congress hadn’t handed over billions to the banks, the bonus tax that so outrages Hindraker wouldn’t exist. But if you’re going to hook for a living, you’d better understand that every now and then, your pimp is going to bitch-slap you.

The presidential gaffe machine is clearly operating on all cylinders:

After comparing his bowling to the Special Olympics on “The Tonight Show” Thursday, President Obama called Special Olympics Chairman Tim Shriver to apologize before the program even aired. “He expressed his disappointment and he apologized, in a way that was very moving,” Shriver said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “It’s important to see that words hurt, and words do matter. And these words that in some respect can be seen as humiliating or a put-down of people with special needs do cause pain, and they do result in stereotypes.”http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=5604161

I love the way that Obama keeps screwing up and the media tries to frame his efforts to make things right as a sign of his depth and sensitivity. Bush’s communications were tragedy; the man tried but he just couldn’t speak smoothly. This guy’s are just pure farce. Didn’t I tell you his administration would be an unending source of amusement?

And the punch line is that this is the guy that liberals genuinely believe is going to fix the economy!

Nicolas Kristoff mourns the media’s loss of control:

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about. Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves. That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices.

I don’t dispute that people seek out information that confirms their prejudices, as I’ve noticed that very few individuals of any stripe go out of their way to acquaint themselves with how rival ideologies think. And of those who do visit sites belonging to what, for lack of a better term, we shall call “the other side”, a large percentage oare trolls who have no intention of actually paying any serious attention to what they are skimming in the interest of seeking grounds on which to base what is usually a shallow and spurious criticism.

But the assumption underlying Kristoff’s concerns are ludicrous. All of the major organs of the mainstream media have been uniformly left-liberal for generations. The Wall Street Journal that Kristoff bravely declares he is going to force himself to read is one of the few notable exceptions, along with Human Events and The Washington Times. The appearance of talk radio, then Fox News, and now online alternatives doesn’t mean that everyone is now locked in an echo chamber, it means that conservatives and libertarians are finally able to escape being subjected to constant left-liberal assault.

Left-leaning individuals like Kristoff are still safely ensconced in the same liberal echo chamber they’ve always inhabited, and the recent revelation of JournoList shows how much the left’s media elite prefers groupthink to the marketplace of ideas. The only thing that has changed is that now everyone, of all political stripes, isn’t forced to listen to just one side of the story anymore.

He was hoping to discover the source of two itching, irritating lumps that had appeared overnight in his rectum. Was this what hemorrhoids were? What were the symptoms of rectal cancer? Surely it couldn’t be… he scratched fretfully at his bothered bottom and for a moment knew a pang of bitter remorse for that drunken night spent with a tattooed sailor so many years ago.

The doctor gestured, and the powerful Chairman of the Federal Reserve dropped his pants.

“Bend over,” the doctor said, reaching for a flashlight. “A bit more, please.”

“What is it, doctor?” asked the nervous banker, too worried to protest the indignity to which he was being subjected.

“Not to worry, Mr. Bernanke,” replied the doctor, removing his rubber gloves and tossing them into the trash. “You’re perfectly well. It’s only Jack Welch and Larry Kudlow.”

KUDLOW: Jack is he [Bernanke] making the sale in your judgment? Is he winning the support of the people? This is such a controversial issue. Opinion polls show that folks do not like these bailouts. Do you think Bernanke himself personally made the sale last night?

WELCH: Well he gave a tremendous presentation Larry last night. He was thoughtful. He was measured. He really radiated confidence. And we need more than anything else, confidence. And he also laid out the challenge for the political forces. He said the pressure will be do we have the political will to make the fix? And that is a real challenge for Washington. He said we’re going to need to go after it with a vengeance. He studied the Depression more than anyone. He’s making a lot of right moves; he’s made a lot of right moves. I’ve been supporting him in our column for the last four months. I think he’s made a ton of right moves, and I happen to believe that he laid the gauntlet down to Washington. Do they have the political will to back up what he needs, the firepower he needs, to get the job done Larry. I think he did a magnificent job.

KUDLOW: You know, I worked for Arthur Burns and Paul Volcker at the New York Fed. Of course like you I knew Greenspan very, very well. I think this is the best television communications performance of any Fed chairman in my lifetime. And I agree with you sir, he did get the job done. And I think he did more to help Obama and all the issues toward recovery than anything we’ve seen so far. He stood alone. He deserves reappointment doesn’t he?

WELCH: Absolutely Larry. He did a job on a broad spectrum. He grabbed the country and he challenged the politicians.

Now you know the economy is headed for the deepest of dismal dire. I haven’t heard praise this obsequious and wildly over the top since the CNBC crew were committing acts of public auto-eroticism over Alan Greenspan’s “masterful” performances while he was inflating the housing bubble. There’s nothing that talking heads and big business love more than the sound of printing presses rolling. You would think that after the financial carnage of the last six months, they would have learned to look more than a quarter ahead.

The amazing thing is that the ever-retarded Republicans are actually opposing this eminently reasonable – and extraordinarily popular – action.

U.S. House Votes 328-93 to slap a 90-percent tax rate on bonuses paid on or after 1/1/09 to persons with family incomes above $250,000 if said persons are employees of a company that received more than $5B in federal bailout money in 2008.

I have no problem with this. No problem at all. The principle of retroactive taxation was well-established under Clinton, so I’m completely for it. And any conservative pundit who wants to lament the idea that the government is getting involved in petty matters beyond its ken is a moron, especially if they supported the bailouts in the first place.

What else did they possibly think was going to happen once the the federal fricking government started picking and choosing who would or would not be permitted to fail? A political circus? Of course it’s a political circus, it’s been a political circus since Paulson predicted economic apocalypse if his buddies weren’t given billions of dollars immediately! What the hell else did anyone expect? Americans weren’t able to get Congress to pay attention to them when they shouted down the first round of bailouts, now that we’re on round five or so it should come as no surprise that they are starting to feel like putting the heads of bonus bankers on pikes.

The floodgates are open! Pump away madly, Federal Reserve. Jack every taxpayer’s taxes up to 90 percent, Congress, and hand out vast sums to those who pay nothing. The system broke some time ago, these are just the thrashings of a mortally wounded beast. I recommend sitting back and watching the fountains of spurting blood as if they were fireworks.

Print a trillion… oooooh! Bail out another bank… ahhhh!

And never forget. This isn’t just the fault of the idiot liberals. This is the fault of the conservatives and moderates who were being pragmatic and sacrificing their priniciples because it was a “crisis”, because it was “necessary”. It’s far too late to raise limited government objections now, Republicans. You can’t dance with the devil and complain when he steps on your toes. Please be sure to buckle the straps on your handbasket, the descent may be a bumpy one!

Here’s your open NCAA thread, basketball fans. Go Gophers!

Yes, in fact, we are going to hit you over the head with it. Because you absolutely deserve it. To his credit, Orac admits that there is something rotten in the current state of “science”, mostly in the area of so-called peer review, but he also worries that the public will draw the correct conclusion from learning of yet another major scientific fraud:

It’s hard to overstate how serious this revelation of scientific fraud is for the field of anesthesiology and medicine. Dr. Reuben was considered a pioneer in his field, and his work is not only widely cited, but serves as the basis for an amount of anesthesia practice that few academic anesthesiologists can lay claim to. The twenty-one papers now retracted represent a body of work that appeared on its surface to be quite impressive….

What most angers me about this case is the massive betrayal of trust. The public expects that its scientists, at the very least, will be honest about their results. Too much depends on it, especially in medical science, where it is people’s health that is at stake. Even worse, much of Dr. Reuben’s work was underwritten by the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the the very nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs combinations of which he studied. What that means for those of us who defend science- and evidence-based medicine is that every crank alt-med site and blog on the Internet is going to be harping on this incident as The Proof That Conventional Medicine Is Hopelessly Corrupt and their favorite woo is being kept down by The Big Bad Pharma Man. Look for Age of Autism and NaturalNews.com to go crazy about this story as proof that they were right all along and The Big Bad Pharma Man has suppressed The Real Proof that vaccines cause autism. Not only has he put a stain on scientific medicine that will be very hard to erase, if it’s even possible at all, but that bastard Reuben has made my work here harder, as well as that of every advocate of of science- and evidence-based medicine, as Whale.to, NaturalNews.com, and Age of Autism, not to mention every crank blog and website spread the story far and wide as some form of “vindication.”

Actually, Orac is decades out of date with regards to the public’s view of scientists. Scientists no longer occupy any special place in the public’s regard. After more than 30 years of being told to “question authority”, the average non-scientist doesn’t automatically believe a scientific authority any more than he believes any other authority. Scientists aren’t lumped in with completely untrustworthy types such as politicans, used-car salesmen, lawyers, and journalists, but they’re no longer viewed as standing on some sort of objective pedestal and they haven’t been for quite some time. Orac should understand this, after all, is his blog not entitled “Respectful Insolence”?

The reality is that scientists aren’t considered much more trustworthy than the clergy, the military, or the police, and are less trusted than doctors and teachers. This is striking when one considers the fact that unlike the other professions, scientists supposedly have the benefit of relying upon what is supposed to be a completely objective system, which means that their constant tendency to play bait-and-switch, wherein they substitute appeals to scientific authority, peer review, and statistical reviews for actual science, has had a more detrimental effect than the otherwise high credibility ratings would appear to suggest.

Just as the televangelist and pedophile priest scandals drove down the trustworthiness of the clergy from 90 percent in 2001 to 64 percent in 2002, the credibility of scientists will likely fall below their 2002 low of 68 percent as the AGW fraud – to which I note Orac himself subscribes – becomes ever more apparent to all and sundry, as more scientific charlatans such as Scott Reuben and Hwang Woo-suk are unmasked, and as scientists constantly flip-flop over quotidian matters such as whether red wine is good for you and if it’s a high-fat diet or a high-carbohydrate diet that causes weight gain.

Like the increasingly discredited news media, (journalists are near the bottom at 39 percent), scientists often seem to assume that the public has no memory. This is understandable; most people are short-sighted idiots with little recall. But, even a complete idiot will notice when he gains 20 pounds on a low-fat diet, when a blizzard shuts down the roads for the tenth time that winter, or when an infant screams and slumps unconscious right after being injected by a “perfectly safe” vaccine. Scientists have relied far too long on their reputation rather than their method, and the public has finally begun to take note.

Orac and other science fetishists will naturally be tempted to dismiss my words, to take them out of context, and to claim that I am too stupid to understand the miraculous wonders of science. But this will only further undermine their credibility; since I have the benefit of a demonstrably higher IQ than most as well as a seven-year archive containing a high percentage of correct calls on everything from market collapses to housing and gold prices, (yes, there were of course some misses – Hillary! – too), avoiding the subject by calling me names is not going to convince anyone who isn’t already a mindless science groupie. Science isn’t some sort of grand mystery approachable only by the elect, it’s merely a process. It’s not difficult to understand; those who claim that it is are merely advertising their own intellectual limitations. If Orac is genuinely concerned about the public’s willingness to trust scientists, he should spend a lot less time worrying about what he calls woo and a lot more time encouraging scientists to get back to the scientific method that established their reputation in the first place. He should encourage them to stop trying to take credit for things that rightly belong to other fields – as one of his commenters pointed out, it wasn’t scientific self-correction that uncovered Reuben’s fraud, but a bureaucrat at the hospital – and to stop abusing legitimate scientific authority by calling upon it in areas clearly outside their areas of expertise. Some scientific self-congratulation is downright insane; being caught by the auditors doesn’t prove the self-correcting nature of embezzlement.

As for vaccines, if he truly wishes to change even a single parent’s mind, Orac and other vaccine champions simply have to stop attempting to wave the increasingly tattered flag of “but science says” in the face of the growing number of science skeptics and think very seriously about why so many people are rejecting the modern American vaccine schedule despite constant pressure from their doctors, schools, and the science fetishists in the media. More pounding the table isn’t going to work, because the parties pounding the table are already considered completely biased and untrustworthy. As I wrote yesterday, show the science! The real science, where the damn hypothesis is actually tested! No more BS “no statistical correlation has been found”, no more “no peer reviewed study has proven”, no more dancing and ducking and evading the obvious solution of actually putting the scientific method to work. Interpolation and extrapolation aren’t sufficient. Statistical analysis isn’t enough. Peer reviewed metastudies are of zero value. Pump 1,000 kids full of toxinsvaccines according to the complete schedule and leave a control group of 1,000 completely unvaccinated. Then report on how they’re doing every six months. There’s no excuse not to do it, it’s eminently doable.

That, and that alone, will suffice to convince parents that science proves the vaccine schedule is sufficiently safe. And if scientists can’t be bothered to actually do the relevant science and sh
ow their work to the public, they shouldn’t be surprised when the public tells them to stick their fraudulent, faux-scientific propaganda up their collective posteriors.

Note – I tend to doubt that political demonstration, peaceful or otherwise, is likely to prove an effective substitute for the scientific method either.

Dr. Helen brings Amy Alkon’s situation at the Orange County Register to our attention:

If people start reading it online as of Tuesday. The editor has conceded to me that it’s been hard to find online (after readers wrote and told me the link was impossible to find).

Her stuff isn’t bad, actually. Here’s a sample:

“In the dating phase, women do what it takes to attract and hang onto a man: Looking after their looks and maintaining a figure that’s more hourglass than beer keg. While there are some wives whose medical issues prevent them from losing weight, too many interpret “Till death do us part” as “You’re stuck with me forever – more of me than you’d ever imagined.” In worst cases, a woman will eat herself so big that Greenpeace tries to save her – until they realize that’s a scrunchie on her head, not a decorative blowhole…. You sacrifice a lot for her and your kids, without reservation. You ask only one thing from her – not that she meet some bizarro new need, just that she start acting like she said “I do” to being in a partnership with you, not “I dough.””

It’s easy enough to check out a few columns in the archive. Why not go for it, especially considering how few women are willing to publicly admit that there are two sides to sex-related issues.